The Night Manager

Season 2 evokes the same sense of watching actors at the top of their game as they volley dramatics back and forth like tennis, and that almost justifies the season's existence.

All of the performers are effective, but the show still belongs to Hiddleston, who imbues Pine with the trauma of the first season in this outing, which emotionally grounds his character as more than just another superspy.

Everything in the season gets better in the second half — especially Calva, who initially comes across as a hunky-but-wan Roper substitute but eventually turns that apparent failing into the arc of a comprehensibly vulnerable performance. From the cast, only the wasting of Colman and Varma feels irritating.

It moves at a faster clip, and it never lets Teddy lull Jonathan and the audience into a treacherous sense of safety quite like Roper did. But perhaps most crucially to its mission and the audience’s enjoyment, it lives with the unsettling reality that the past is never dead.

The unbalanced season mostly compensates, in the final accounting, for the time it wastes up front. Watch the first half while you’re folding laundry or cooking dinner or trading texts with a devastatingly attractive person who will prove to be either your savior or your ruin. After that, though? Put your phone away.

It still floats far above most of the competition. But it no longer feels pristine.

Gripping without being excessively silly, compelling without being indulgently cerebral, The Night Manager pulls off the, increasingly rare, trick of knowing its audience, understanding its success, and replicating the formula.

On early evidence, it is another classy thriller, albeit suffering from the lack of Hugh Laurie as cold-blooded arms dealer Richard Roper and Tom Hollander as his scene-stealing sidekick, Corky. The pair gave series one its bite. Hiddleston is reliably good.

Fast-paced and tons of fun, this return makes you wonder why nobody thought to make a sequel years ago.

Points of greater divergence may present themselves down the line – we've still four hours to go – but even if this season winds up being a tribute act for the first, at least its homaging quality material. After such a long absence, fans will hardly be sorry to watch The Night Manager again.

The spy game heats up with Tom Hiddleston and Olivia Colman back in action and a new villain (Diego Calva) to add to the political and sexual intrigue. That three-way dance with Hiddleston, Calva and Camila Morrone generates enough sizzle to singe your screen.

If you’re going to wait a decade to create a second season of a show, it’s got to do two things: It’s got to remind people who watched the first season what the connections back to that season are, and it’s got to tell a new story that’s just as compelling as the first season was. The second season of The Night Manager definitely accomplishes the first, but hasn’t yet proven that it’ll accomplish the second.

This new cocktail of le Carré and Bond left me slightly shaken, but not stirred.

Look, it is well written and well made and it is too early to judge, but I am not getting that “I must see the next episode immediately” feeling yet. The lengthy recap of the last series at the beginning merely served as a reminder of what we are missing.

Season 2 is not without enjoyable intrigue, yet never proves worth the risk of opening a closed (literal) book.